Trumps EPA To Repeal Obamas Waters Of The US Rule

Just released:

The Environmental Protection Agency will rescind an Obama-era regulation that critics argued would expand federal control over non-navigable bodies of water on private property.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced Tuesday the agency would repeal the Clean Water Rule, or the “waters of the United States” rule (WOTUS), which was finalized by the Obama administration in 2015.

“We are taking significant action to return power to the states and provide regulatory certainty to our nation’s farmers and businesses,” Pruitt said in a statement.

In February, President Donald Trump
ordered
EPA to review WOTUS and, if necessary, replace it with a rule that interprets the term “navigable waters” in a “manner consistent with the opinion of Justice Antonin Scalia in Rapanos v. United States.”

The Obama administration did not rely on Scalia’s reasoning to craft WOTUS. EPA argued WOTUS was needed to clear up jurisdictional confusion in the wake of two U.S. Supreme Court cases.

Thirty-two states filed suit against EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to overturn the rule. Pruitt was party to the suit while attorney general of Oklahoma. WOTUS opponents saw an early victory in August 2015 when a federal judge in North Dakota issued a stay against the rule, suggesting it suffered from legal problems.

Republicans, industry and property owners saw the rule as a federal land grab. Republicans claimed the EPA’s rule was influenced by left-wing environmental activists.

Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
issued a report
that found high-level White House staffers “assured environmentalist groups the Administration would quickly finalize the WOTUS rule.”

That “caused the career staff involved in developing the rule to feel pressure to meet accelerated timelines, which caused deficiencies in the regulatory process,” according to Chaffetz’s report.